Preliminary Setup

The base station computer should have the entire lizi_robot meta-package built. You should also answer 'y' (yes) to all steps of the setup.sh file (see the Lizi robot installation tutorial)

In order to use the joystick control node one should also install the joystick-drivers package.

$ sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-joystick-drivers

Launching the Lizi robots

For the following examples we assume we have two Lizi robots with id's 1 and 2 with IP addresses 192.168.0.101 and 192.168.0.102 respectively. The base station computer IP address is 192.168.0.100. One can use any other IP addresses.

First, we will edit the lizi_robot/lizi_base_station/launch/base_station.launch file to match the above Lizi robots addresses:

Make sure that the <machine/> parameters are all correct according to your network setup and to the specific robot computer username and password. Note that from the factory the default username is "lizi" and password is "a". .

In order to select exactly what will be launched on the lizi robots, see the lizi_robot/lizi_base_station/launch/remote_lizi.launch file.

Set the following parameters according to the base station IP address:

Now you can control all the Lizi robots, try printing the current topics to check that everything is ok:

$ rostopic list

Controlling the Lizi robots

One can use the multi_lizi_control node to control multiple Lizi robots from a single joystick.

The lizi_robot/lizi_base_station/launch/base_station.launch is used to launch the required parameters and start the node.

You will have to figure out your joystick port and the id numbers of joystick axes and buttons. To do so, type:

$ ls /dev/input

and find the joystick port name (usually /dev/input/js0).

Now run:

$ sudo jstest /dev/input/js0

Play with joystick sticks and buttons and write down the numbers of the axes which you would like to control the drive and the axes to control the pan-tilt system. You should also choose a button for switching between Lizi robots.